In the semiconductor industry, semiconductor wafers are diced to extract individual integrated devices. As a dicing station dices the individual integrated circuits, a stream of water flows over the dice to cool the semiconductor wafer and rinses debris off the wafer. An operator removes the semiconductor wafer from the dicing station and places it in a separate drying machine. An infrared heating lamp within the separate drying machine evaporates the water from a semiconductor wafer. This process is inefficient and adds defects to the semiconductor wafer.
Some wafers have C4 (controlled collapse chip connection) bumps that are conductive and contain lead and tin. During the dicing and rinsing operation, the C4 bumps retain water. Drying the semiconductor wafer with an inert gas at room temperature should be performed as soon as possible after the dicing operation to reduce the likelihood of C4 bump corrosion. Therefore, each semiconductor wafer in the dicing station is typically removed one at a time and taken over to the drying machine. Typically, a dicing station can hold 25 wafers. The total dicing time for 25 wafers is approximately 200 minutes if the dicing station continuously runs without stopping.
However, stopping the dicing station for every semiconductor wafer requires the overall time for the 25 wafers to increase by approximately 50 minutes. The dicing time is dependent on semiconductor wafer size and the speed of the saw. Having one apparatus dedicated to dicing and a different apparatus dedicated to drying requires more floor space, adds more costs, and can increase bottlenecks as wafers build up at either the drying apparatus or the dicing apparatus.